Thomas Tryon, The Other (1971)

Tryon, Thomas. The Other. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, May 1971.


The Other at Goodreads


Rating:     8/10



The tagline to the 1976 Fawcett Crest paperback edition of Tom Tryon's first novel reads: "You have never read a novel like this one." The proclamation, as bold as it is, is fairly accurate, even as we near 2020.

Well into the economic depression of the 1930s, the Perry family lives in relative comfort, subsisting on the meager yield of their aging farm. During this particular, sweltering summer, thirteen year-old twins Holland and Niles pass their time playing imaginative games and guarding their little secrets. Yet the atmosphere is heavily strained, and their relationship seems to be deteriorating as the family is dealing with the tragedy of their father's recent, violent death. It is the story of a family suffering from depression, amid a broader societal Depression.

An incredibly well written novel, whose suspense and horror is overshadowed by genuine family tragedy. Stripped of its horror, The Other would be just as effective as a family drama, as its characters are excellently drawn, including the bit players in the New England town. As with most successful horror novels, we feel the tragedy that the members of the family experience because these people are so very real, and even if we do not like them, because they are so real we nonetheless empathize with what they are going through. The mother who is practically bed-ridden in grief; the preferred son who feels the need to minister to his mother; the grandmother who must care for that fragile boy whose entire family has, in some way, abandoned him; the guilt-ridden groundskeeper who suffers for an act of which he is not guilty; the grieving aunt and uncle; the pregnant sister about to bear her child.

These characters live in a contained environment that becomes so vivid as we read, Tryon might as well have drawn us a map. Sheltered in this wide open yet nonetheless claustrophobic environment, we see the events, both minute and tragic, through the eyes of the good twin. Niles, sensitive and caring, looks up to the cruelly mischievous Holland. Because Holland appears to have distanced himself from his brother and the farm, Niles is left to wander near aimlessly around home and town, immersed in his imagination and watched by his Ukrainian grandmother. Alongside his meanderings, we learn of family history and family dynamics.

Whereas many suspense novels of the period, including Tryon's strong 1973 follow-up, Harvest Home, have in the modern era become fairly predictable, The Other retains much of its initial power. It is not just the effective ending, but other unexpected revelatory incidents throughout the novel that strain our emotions. Because the novel is patiently paced, the build-up and end-result creep up on the reader, and I found myself to be more immersed in this world than I thought I was while actually reading. It's as though we were placed in a slow-boiling cauldron, comfortable at the outset, unaware that we are in fact being cooked alive. (With apologies for the analogy, but I recently completed Shogun.)

Well worth a read, even if your copy is as dilapidated as this one.

For additional information on The Other and its author, Thomas Tryon, please read this enjoyable and informative article by Grady Hendrix.

Thomas Tryon, Harvest Home (1973)

Tryon, Thomas, Harvest Home, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973
___________, Harvest Home, New York: Fawcett Crest, July 1974 (my edition)

Visit Harvest Home at Goodreads
Visit Harvest Home at ISFdb
Visit Harvest Home at IBList
Read about other Friday's Forgotten Books at Patti Abbott's blog.

Rating: 7/10


The early 1970s experienced a mini-trend in pagan-related horror, pagan communities subsisting in modern society, featuring harvest rituals, heaps of corn and various forms of sacrifice. The three that most readily come to mind are the excellent Robin Hardy film The Wicker Man (1973), Stephen King's short story "Children of the Corn" (1977), and their predecessor Harvest Home, Thomas Tryon's follow-up to his successful first novel The Other. Each of these stories focus on long-standing farming communities that maintain traditions dating back to the communities' early days, and deal with outsiders, crops and, of course, sacrifice. All three pieces are quire strong, and Harvest Home, forty years after its publication, continues to generate a strong response, despite being out of print.

[I have read in some places that The Wicker Man was based loosely on Harvest Home, yet this makes no sense since The Wicker Man, released the same year that Harvest Home first saw publication, was filmed the year before, and no doubt drafted even earlier.]

Briefly, the story is narrated by Ned Constantine, a New York painter who, along with wife Beth and daughter Kate, move to the isolated rural Connecticut community of Cornwall Coombe. They discover the town by chance, falling in love with an empty house that the townsfolk at first are unwilling to consider selling. Months later Ned receives a call offering the house, and urban American family settles into the quiet community.

"WARNING: DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF YOU ARE ALONE. BUT IF YOU DO, KEEP REPEATING TO YOURSELF, "IT'S ONLY A BOOK. IT'S ONLY A BOOK." This hyperbolic announcement, blaring in thick bold type at the top of the back cover, is perhaps ingenious 1973 marketing at work, and may have helped propel the novel to many bestseller lists, but it is unfortunately misleading and might even lead to disappointment to contemporary readers. The novel contains clear horror elements, yet the weight of the plot rests on elements of mystery and suspense. Indeed the first three quarters of the book read like a cozy mystery (minus the humour element) rather than a piece of horror, as Ned first begins to integrate into the community, and slowly discover that something is amiss. The last quarter of the novel is very much horror, more akin to classic horror than anything modern; we are still shy of the era of Stephen King and Peter Straub.

Community conspiracies are prevalent in varying forms of horror, from novels such as Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives to recent television anthology episodes of the Forrest Whittaker-hosted Twilight Zone ("Evergreen") and Mick Garris's lackluster Fear Itself ("Community"). There are unavoidable elements of irony in that the reader, aware that the novel (or show) is of a genre, are a step ahead of the protagonist for the bulk of the plot, whereas the sequence sees the narrator defeated by the community.


Which brings us to the major flaw of Harvest Home. Once he understands what is going on at Cornwall Coombe, and that he and his family are in danger, rather than tell his wife and daughter what is going on and quickly drive them back to New York, he keeps the secrets to himself and decides to catch a sneak peek at what goes on during the night-time ritual of the annual Harvest Home celebrations. Constantine, overall, is not a sympathetic character: he i aggressive, macho, and though he genuinely cares for his family, there is a certain distance between himself and both Beth and Kate. We learn early that their marriage has been troubled, as has Kate's upbringing as she suffered health-wise via her parents' difficulties, and this history makes of them easy targets for Conrwall Coombe's unique society. The novel, with its matriarchal universe, can almost be read as a kind of 1970s feminist treatise, where a traditional matriarch defeats the modern macho male, except for the hints of misogyny that creep into the text. Most of the women, including Beth, seem to be derived from the 1950s wife ideal, and this would be great if it were addressed, that the housewife of old is a vessel for a strong woman, someone repressed and finally breaks through that shell via the Harvest Home celebrations. Alas the text does not address that issue, and these women come across merely as dated.

Despite this bothersome flaw, the novel is well written, well constructed and the community terror is very much real. Cornwall Coombe is populated with various characters, and the most frightening aspect of these people is that the tradition of Harvest Home is so embedded in their lives that even those who do oppose it are trapped by an age's old tradition.

There was an NBC miniseries based on the novel titled The Dark Secret of Harvest Home. It features a recognizable cast with Bette Davis as the matriarch Mary Fortune, Rosanna Arquette as Beth, Rene Auberjonois as the peddler Jack Stump, Norman Lloyd as the bell ringer Amys Pemrose, the wonderful Donald Pleasance as Narrator (interesting, since the novel is narrated by its protagonist), and in the role of Ned (re-named Nick, perhaps to make it more obviously Greek), longtime television actor David Ackroyd. I'd be interested in watching it, as it has a good reputation.